Report: Want to Ease Commuter Pain? Highways and Sprawl Won’t Help

An analysis by CEOs For Cities shows that contrary to previous reports, the longest commutes are in sprawling Southeastern cities. ##http://www.ceosforcities.org/pagefiles/DrivenApartInfoGraphicFINAL.jpg##View a larger version of this infographic.## Image: CEOs for Cities

Imagine two drivers leaving downtown to head home. Each of them sits in traffic for the first ten miles of the commute but at that point, their paths diverge. The first one has reached home. The second has another twenty miles to drive, though luckily for her, the roads are clear and congestion doesn’t slow her down. Who’s got a better commute?

Shockingly, the standard method for measuring traffic congestion implies that the second driver has it better. The Texas Transportation Institute’s Urban Mobility Report (UMR) only studies how congestion slows down drivers from hypothetical maximum speeds, completely ignoring how long it takes to actually get where you’re going. The result is an incessant call for more highway lanes from newspapers across the country.

An important new report from CEOs for Cities, though, has laid out major problems with the UMR. It shows how commuters in compact regions, whose daily trips look hellish based on the UMR, actually spend far less time in the car than residents of sprawling metro areas.

The misleading metrics in the UMR are a convenient bludgeon for the highway lobby. According to report author Joe Cortright, the UMR serves as “a drumbeat saying we need to spend a lot more on expanding capacity. It gets used in political speeches, it’s used in lobbying.”

The key flaw is a measurement called the Travel Time Index. That’s the ratio of average travel times at peak hours to the average time if roads were freely flowing. In other words, the TTI measures how fast a given trip goes; it doesn’t measure whether that trip is long or short to begin with.

Relying on the TTI suggests that more sprawl and more highways solve congestion, when in fact it just makes commutes longer. Instead, suggests CEOs for Cities, more compact development is often the more effective — and more affordable — solution.

Take the Chicago and Charlotte metro areas. Chicagoland has the second worst TTI in the country, after Los Angeles. Charlotte is about average. But in fact, Chicago-area drivers spend more than 15 minutes less traveling each day, because the average trip is 5.5 miles shorter than in Charlotte. Charlotte only looks better because on average, its drivers travel closer to the hypothetical free-flowing speed.

For Cortright, perhaps the biggest problem with the UMR is that it suggests traffic congestion is always getting worse. “One insight from our reanalysis is that in some places it’s getting better,” he said, “and it’s getting better because people are changing the pattern of the trips they’re taking.” In Portland, Oregon, for example, the TTI got much worse between 1982 and 2007. But in fact, by reducing average travel distances from 19.6 miles to 16.0 miles over that period, Portland shaved 11 minutes of peak travel off its average commute.

The CEOs for Cities report concludes that the UMR not only measures the wrong things, it also measures things the wrong way. For example, it doesn’t use observed speeds to calculate how much congestion slows down traffic during peak hours, but relies on a mechanistic model based on the total number of cars moving in a full 24-hour period. When showing the amount of gas that congestion wastes, it relies on an outdated study that incorrectly assumes faster speeds are always more fuel-efficient.

This is enormous. The TTI was the industry standard. By showing that places like Charlotte were doing fine, mayors there could sit comfortably, while their cities sprawled out into oblivion. Even though people knew traffic was bad, they had no way to quantify how bad it really was.

The graphic, though, is a bit misleading since the size of the circles only indicates extra hours traveled due to sprawl. It should be noted, though, that Nashville, Louisville, Indianapolis, and Detroit (populations 1.6, 1.3, 1.7, 5.4 million, respectively) ALL had more hours stuck in traffic/year than NYC (population 19 million).

The UMR isn’t showing Charlotte is fine. It’s showing Charlotte is as bad as Chicago. The reality is that how much time you’re sitting in traffic doesn’t matter as much as how much time this traffic costs you. This is what the total time wasted per traveler metric is about.

The auto-sprawl system does not work. It is a major integral system based on a consumer product. How many more studies before the educated classes overcome their brainwashing and speak out against it. People are suffering. The poor, the old, the young, the disabled — prisoners. Small business suffocated by clogged streets. People dying in energy wars while others sit in traffic burning ancient sunlight and dumping carbon into the air–free. We need partisans. Will you join us?

ALSO ON STREETSBLOG

Crossposted from City Observatory. Everything is bigger in Texas — which must be why, for the past 30 years, the Texas Transportation Institute (TTI) has basically cornered the market for telling whoppers about the supposed toll that traffic congestion takes on the nation’s economy. Today, they’re back with a new report, “The Urban Mobility Scorecard,” which purports to […]

Congress has done its job, such as it is, and passed a transportation bill. Now it’s handed off the policymaking to U.S. DOT, which must issue a raft of rules, definitions, and guidance to accompany the new law, known as MAP-21. According to sources with intimate knowledge of this process, much depends on how DOT […]

How should we grade America’s transportation systems? The big, headline-grabbing transportation metric right now is the Texas Transportation Institute’s Urban Mobility Report, which holds up the lack of congestion as the ultimate sign of a well-functioning transportation system. By that measure, cities like Kansas City, Phoenix, and Detroit — where car commutes can be free-flowing […]

St. Louis is every highway planner’s dream. Consistently ranked among the least-congested cities in America, the region’s car commuters spend a smaller share of their trips to work sitting in traffic than all but two other cities. That means St. Louis car commuters aren’t encumbered much by other car commuters, just like in those car commercials. But […]

Last week we wrote about the flawed measurement system employed by the Texas Transportation Institute in its annual Urban Mobility Rankings, which emphasize the free motion of cars over total time spent commuting. TTI’s rankings highlighted the relative mobility of cities like St. Louis, Buffalo and Detroit, while decrying the congestion of Chicago and Washington, […]

(Photo: TTI Urban Mobility Report) The latest edition of the Texas Transportation Institute’s influential urban mobility report was released yesterday, prompting a flurry of media coverage focused largely on a faux-ironic theme that would do Alanis Morrissette proud — the bad economy is giving us less traffic! The TTI found a one-hour drop in the […]